Bluetooth

SMS Audio is well established with the headphones coming by way of 50 Cent, however it looks like they have also branched out into the portable speaker market. This latest will bring the familiar "by 50" branding and will be arriving as a Bluetooth 4.0 compatible speaker.

Early this year we reported on HTC's launch of the HTC Mini, a small candy-bar phone whose sole purpose is to connect to the HTC Butterfly, known as the Droid DNA in the US. Since then, there has been little word about it due to it being available only for the Chinese HTC Butterfly model. But it seems that the strange Mini is about to make a reappearance, this time in the UK market.

The smartwatch space continues to be tested and it is looking like the latest entry is going to be one called the Omate TrueSmart. This will be another watch that takes the funding campaign route. The folks at Omate have yet to specify which platform they will be using, however they have provided us with a few early details about what can be expected.

Who says good things must come in big packages? Definitely not LG who just announced a new Bluetooth headset no larger than a matchbox. Don't let the size deceive you, though, as the small device packs just the right features to make it worth a longer look.

At this point it's all but confirmed the next version of Android will be 4.3 Jelly Bean, but we're still waiting for it to arrive. After missing in action at Google I/O, it has shown up here and there but nothing has been made official. We've been seeing Android 4.3 a lot lately, and today have one more sighting of the latest OS clearing the Bluetooth certification process.

We have recently spent some time playing with a set of Parrot headphones. Specifically, the Parrot ZIK headphones, which come as a result of a partnership with Philippe Stark. These headphones feature goodies such as active noise cancellation, a touch control panel, Bluetooth, NFC and a motion detector. Parrot also has an Android app available called the Parrot Audio Suite.

Sony has unveiled its latest Android timepiece, the Sony SmartWatch 2 SW2, a 1.6-inch touchscreen accessory to your smartphone or tablet. Pulling caller ID, messages, Facebook and Twitter notifications, music information and control, and more to your wrist, the SmartWatch 2 pairs via Bluetooth with NFC thrown in to make that straightforward.

Sony has officially taken the wraps off of its new phablet, the Sony Xperia Z Ultra, a whopping 6.4-inch Full HD Android smartphone powered by Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 800 chipset. Running at 2.2GHz, the MSM8974 quadcore makes the Xperia Z Ultra one of the fastest - if not, for the moment at least, the fastest - phones around; it also gets 4G LTE and an 8-megapixel camera.

While wearable technology and computing is really starting to take off, I've found myself struggling with the idea behind a smartwatch. I've admitted I'm not a fan in the past, but this new watch from a Shanghai-based company called the GEAK Watch has my attention. Why you ask? Because it claims to do so much more than most of those other so called "smartwatches" we've seen in the past.

Today, we're seeing some mixed reports regarding a new Samsung smartphone that will be headed to Verizon Wireless. So far the details are scant, but it's likely the newly announced Galaxy S4 Mini, but for Big Red here in the USA. Samsung devices for Verizon always have model numbers starting with SCH, and today we're seeing a new one that has our interest piqued.